The piece of linen, which I had thought too bright, too orange-yellow, too-something to be usable, was destined to be the lining of another stitchery. But when I initially thought about the Pandemic and how I would express those feelings, it was exactly right. I would use the form of a traditional stitched sampler to express something not at all traditional, and I would learn the new stitched language I would need to tell the story that is still unfolding.
The piece was not stitched in one several-weeks setting; I have worked on it since the spring. Some event, some reaction to plural events would set me to thinking, and I would be off and stitching again for several days.
The border came last, so it should be the first to be explained. I thought about edges, and decided the raw edges would do well for this raw time. No turning under the cloth or making it neat. In deference to the world I used to know, there is a thin strip of pale green running down the right side. It is a sort of farewell to stability and normality. The stitched border is tight, restricting, and not at all a straight line. On the upper left, it bulges and the heavy grids restrain a single, pale dot. Running stitch in lines echo the gold, looping outside edge of the border. Those lines are interrupted by record-keeping, stitches marking the days and weeks, some days more fraught than others.
In the interior, there are expressions of anger, bewilderment, of beginnings that had nowhere to go, of abrupt endings. Mid way, the lines and groups start out with good intention, but they compress, begin to overlap, and as the vertical lines move to the right, they become looser, unable to retain their shape and form. Over this section are horizontal lines that wander over them, making their way to an edge of negative space.
Below the block of vertical lines, below the turquoise line of tight, tiny Herringbone stitches that wander, wave, turn and finally end after having accomplished absolutely nothing by their presence, is a mesh of overlapping Buttonhole Stitches. The threads are a range of heavy, coarse cotton and linen, to barely-twisted silks, rising to lighter, fine silks and cottons. Thinking, simply being on these days was a struggle as the roster of the dead grew longer and longer.
The gaps in stitch are a reflection of thinking, of needing a space of no thought; meditative silence. The single, recurring thought was a line from Yeats, "Things fall apart; the center cannot hold."
I am not sure this is finished, any more than the Pandemic is over. But this is my record, thus far.
The Second Coming
William Butler Yeats
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
